I apologize. I should have been more specific, though I just visited the "How to get Rakudo Perl 6" and got an answer to my question.

I (like most Windows users) don't have a C compiler and have never been a C/C++/C# developer. I was a Perl/DB/Network developer for a long time and, since moving out of development, have continued using Perl to create tools and systems to help me in my work, which requires Windows. Oh well.

Well color me contradictory and call me flame-bait, but I'm really annoyed by
the original blog posting, as well as this follow-up article. Am I the only
one? In truth, you've answered a lot of questions for me. But it leaves open
some more.

What first got me going was when people don't ask the *right* question, your
seeming to come off like someone who responds to the question, "Can I have a
cookie?" with "Don't you mean *MAY* I have a cookie?" I'm sorry you don't like
the word "finished" but as you say yourself,

...for many of us, myself included, we're only now learning how to put
words to parts of the process to be able to tell others about them.

My bullshit detector went through the roof when I read that. So I read on, and
on, and on.

The gist of the whole thing seems to be some philosophical tripe about the
word "finished". You seem completely unaware that most people know and fully
expect that a "point-oh" release may not be complete and will probably have
bugs. Perl 5.10.1 was just released and some of the brand-new 5.10 features
have already been changed due to feedback after people had a chance to use it.
No one expected Perl 5.10 to be "finished" in the sense you imply. Yet you
present a long-winded dance around whether anything can ever really be
finished and about whether it will be useful to many people versus everyone.
You even say

The problem then is that many people rightly take 'development
release' to mean 'not ready to use yet', and that's also counterproductive
to what we need."

If drawing the correct conclusion is counter-productive, then the problem
must lie elsewhere -- that is, not with the questioners but with what is being
questioned. You conclude with

Ultimately Rakudo Star is intended to give some justifiable
support and clarity to phrases like "Perl 6 exists" and "you can now write
usable applications in Perl 6", without the distractions that arise from
the "When will [Perl 6 | Rakudo] be finished?" sorts of questions...I'd
like us to start finding ways to move our discussions beyond the "finished
/ not finished" trap that we seem to have fallen into. I'd like to help us
all escape this trap because (1) I don't think it reflects reality, and
(2) if "Perl 6 is finished" remains the primary criteria that most people
use to decide whether or not to write applications in Perl 6 (and the
criteria that we hold ourselves to), then we'll never get
there.

Asking when it will be completed is a trap? Asking when we can write
applications is a distraction? Assuming you have a prioritized list of
features that you will implement in a release that may or may not be 6.0 will
keep you from ever getting...somewhere??? After writing several inappropriate
responses, I started thinking about how you could possibly write the above
with a straight face (I assume you had a straight face when you wrote it).

The conclusion I came to is that as long as it is called Perl 6, you will
never escape the "trap" because the project is no longer Perl 6. It's that
simple.

Ten years ago, Jon Orwant started throwing mugs against a wall, saying to
Larry Wall, "we are fucked unless we can come up with something that will
excite the community, because everyone's getting bored and going off and doing
other things." Larry decided Perl 6 was that something. Perl 5 was a complete
rewrite of Perl 4, and so Perl 6 would be a complete rewrite. Then came the
Apocalypses and the Exegeses -- these were supposed to be the spec. There was
to be a virtual machine, and eventually Parrot was decided upon. Then it all
went quiet.

In 2005, the pugs project implemented what there was of the Perl 6 spec in
Haskell. Okay, interesting, but I think it was then that people started asking
whatever happened to Perl 6. And that's when the philosophical non-answers
started. And the people espousing the non-answers don't seem to grok why they
do not satisfy the askers of said questions.

The problem is that it's is no longer Perl 6. It seems to be some kind of Perl
Trek, forever exploring new features, new paradigms, boldly considering new
ways of thinking about computer languages. Maybe it was the exposure to
Haskell that made people rethink Perl's underlying workings, but in the end it
seems to have resulted in a permanent attention-deficit disorder problem,
where the developers are forever attracted to every shiny object that wanders
into their field of view.

Perl 6 was supposed to excite the Perl community, but the excitement has
waned and Jon Orwant has gone off and left the Perl community entirely. Perl
Trek has to be explained at great length, amidst pleas to not use the word
"finished", while no one gets it anyway, and the ship's captain has some
philosophical issue with "finishing" things.

Perl 6 had the beginnings of a spec. Perl Trek has a spec that is really a
journal of the strange new worlds the crew has visited, and that may be
rewritten at any time.

Perl 6 was going to rewrite Perl 5 and bring it up to date and make it more
consistent with the last 20 years of software language development. Perl Trek
is not the successor to Perl 5 and has no real idea what it wants to be when
it grows up, but we can never really know until we get there, and when you get
down to it, the "there" you get to is not the final destination, so how can we
really talk about "there" when it could be anywhere???

Perl 6 should have a release date. You prioritize what will go into that
release, you implement it, and then you release it. Perl Trek will have a
release named Rakudo, which appears designed to get people off the back of the
crew of the SS A.D.D so they can return to aimlessly exploring, or endlessly
navel-gazing, or whatever it is that they think is so much more important than
releasing something long-time Perl users would be proud of. For that matter,
has the Perl community even come onto your radar recently, except as a
distraction from your "explorations"?

Look, if you want to complete *ANYTHING* -- a language, a race, something
you're cooking for dinner -- you need to decide what you're doing and do it.
Once you're done, you can redo it or add to it or whatever. You discard any
pretensions about whether something can be "finished" or not and you spec out
what you're going to do. Then you do it. Then you gather feedback, and you
consider all the things you'd like to change/add/remove, and you write a new
spec. Then you implement it. *THAT* process is never finished. But each
iteration most certainly is finished.

This is the kind of project that gets cancelled in the real world of
software development because they cost too much or the need they were meant to
fill, or the competition they were meant to compete with, have moved on,
rendering the project pointless. But a project like Perl 6 can never be
cancelled. It can only go on and on, insisting on its own relevance, as people
forget about it (as they largely have).

I may get flamed for this, but I'm writing this because I care about Perl,
about the community, about Perl 6. Flame me if you must, but when people ask
when Perl 6 will be finished, at least give the honest answer: you have no
intention of ever finishing, let alone releasing, what was promised 10 years
ago.